As you step into one of the gleaming chocolate-colored booths and slide along the ruby-red upholstered cushions, the nostalgia that permeates La Opera Bar is palpable. From an intimate corner booth you watch the hustle and bustle of the dining room, but remain inside your own dining world. One of the few centenarian businesses in Mexico City, the booths of La Opera have served as the meeting place of notable journalists, politicians, scoundrels and authors. Gabriel Garcia Marquez once refused some fans an autograph on a napkin, left the bar and returned an hour later with signed books for them. A faded newspaper clipping on the wall shows Carlos Monsiváis, José Luis Cuevas, Fernando Benitez and Carlos Fuentes seated around a table, deep in discussion.

The typical after-beach taverna in Greece almost always focuses on fish. You want to sit seaside, still a little salty from your swim, watching the last rays of the day’s sunshine drip into the sea. It’s certainly a beautiful image, and very typically Greek. Most of the time, a day trip to the beach does end this way, particularly for Athenians when they’re looking for an escape from the sticky heat of the city center. Trigono, a restaurant in the town of Kalyvia, makes the case for ditching post-dip fish in favor of something else: grilled meat. Tomahawk steaks, lamb ribs, long spicy sausages, even offal cuts that you wouldn’t expect to see outside of major Greek holidays.

On Travessa do Monte, one of the friendliest streets in Lisbon’s Graça neighborhood, natural wine flows as freely as conversation. We’ve come here, right by the arch and with a narrow view of the city and the river, to have a glass with Giulia Capaccioli and Massimiliano Bartoli, two Italians from Tuscany who met in Venice and now live in Lisbon. The pair’s bar, Vino Vero, which they opened in April 2019, is the spring that feeds this natural wine oasis. To fully understand the origins of this wine bar, we need to go back to Italy. There, in Tuscany, Massimiliano’s brother, Matteo, has a winery producing natural wine – that is, wine to which nothing is added or taken away.

Naples’s Quartieri Spagnoli, the "Spanish Quarters,” are a part of the city with a long and tumultuous history. Founded in 1500, the Quartieri Spagnoli were created by Don Pedro De Toledo to accommodate the Spanish soldiers who were residing or passing through Naples. With the arrival of the soldiers, the network of narrow streets became a hotbed for illegal economic activities, from cigarette smuggling to drug dealing to prostitution, earning the district a bad reputation that stuck for centuries – even Neapolitans from other neighborhoods were afraid of entering the Quartieri Spagnoli. In recent decades, however, the atmospheric district has become one of the city’s tourist attractions, recognized as one of the centers of Neapolitan gastronomy as well as a place of craftsmanship, cultural and anthropological initiatives.

On a warm August morning two years ago in an orchard somewhere west of Aomori City in Japan’s Tōhoku region (about 4 hours from Tokyo by train), we watched blackcurrant farmer Kenji Hayashi scoop dark magenta gelato into paper cups. Ribena had nothing on this. It tasted like summer incarnate, an electric blackcurrant explosion tempered with sugar and brightened with lemon juice. We ate greedily, trying to finish our gelato before the heat turned it into a puddle. “So, how did you make the gelato?” We asked him. “I met Ayumi-chan at a bar,” he replied. He’s not alone. This is apparently how Ayumi Chiba of Gelato Natura meets all her fruit suppliers: drinking at bars.

Souvlaki might just be Greece’s most popular food. Meat cooked on a stick, wrapped in a pita, dressed with sliced tomato and onion and a dollop of tzatziki, it can be eaten on the run – and it’s often the first thing visitors run to eat as soon as they arrive in this country. It’s an enduring favorite for Greeks, too. Not only is it delicious, but the standard kebab* is also inexpensive, costing around just 3 to 4 euros. The challenge, then, is to find kebabs and gyros that are more imaginative, still juicy and delicious, with a wider range of fillings and toppings, perhaps even vegetarian and vegan options – and which are still moderately priced.

Even as traffic slithers to a crawl west of the 405 Freeway on Santa Monica Boulevard, drivers may be hard-pressed to notice the small storefront known as Naan Hut standing on their periphery. Neither its name nor its red-and-yellow signage offer any indication that a 1,000-year-old Persian tradition of baking naan sangak is upheld within these walls in the heart of Tehrangeles, the unofficial name for the West L.A. stomping grounds of L.A.’s Iranian diaspora. An ancient bread, legend ascribes the origins of sangak to the 10th-century Persian military. Soldiers would march together carrying small river stones known in Farsi as “sangak,” arranging them together at their day’s destination to aid in the special technique of baking this bread come chow time.

In Oaxaca, when friends come together to eat after a long night out, sitting down for brunch becomes a challenge – everyone has different cravings and dietary needs. In the heart of the city center, there is a place with something for everyone: Tendajón Agavería The all-day eatery is a true standout among the numerous restaurants that serve classic Oaxacan food, offering a variety of dishes that oscillate between traditional and innovative flavors. From the Croque Madame with smoked quesillo to a fresh poleo mint couscous with shrimp cooked in chintextle (chili paste), the menu has a strong Oaxacan overtone interpreted in very unexpected ways.

A "blank canvas." This was Fred Hua's first impression of the bright and airy space that would become Nhà Mình, his Vietnamese restaurant and coffee shop in Ridgewood, Queens. Like Fred's bygone restaurant of the same name, which had closed several years earlier, Nhà Mình offers a gallery for exhibits by local artists, room for his own inventiveness in the kitchen and a meeting place where, in Fred's words, he can "build community." The community in which Fred was born, in San Jose, California, is home to the largest overseas Vietnamese population in the world. Many of the conversations he heard there as a child, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were in Vietnamese – although as Fred tells us, he would always respond in English.

Settling into our first cross-country journey in Turkey many years ago, we were pleasantly surprised by the comforts of Turkish bus travel. The young garson wore a proper uniform and dribbled cologne onto our hands every hour or so. Tea was served regularly, accompanied by one of our early Turkish culinary discoveries, Eti brand pop kek – those unctuous and delicious cakes frosted or stuffed with everything from raisins to chocolate – the Anatolian Twinkie. Call us heathens, but we love them. We’ve tried many traditional Turkish cakes, but none we encountered measured up to the beloved pop kek. That is, until one recent visit to Fatih Sarmacısı, an Ottoman-era shop making our new favorite cake, sarma (the word means “wrapped” or “rolled up” in Turkish).

New Orleans is arguably one of the most Afro-Caribbean cities in the United States. In the minds of some, we don’t even qualify as a US city, but rather the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean. From our architecture to our food and our rhythms, we sit apart from the rest of the South. We love spice and deep flavors, cooking that is evocative of people and place. Jamaican food would seem like a natural fit here, and it is, though it is not nearly as commonplace as it should be, all things considered. But Richard Rose and his wife Jackie Diaz are looking to change that with their new Upper 9th Ward restaurant on St. Claude Avenue, Jamaican Jerk House.

I first met Socorro Irinea Valera Flores years ago, when Oaxaca was not yet under the spotlight of the culinary industry. As part of a high school project in which I had to map Oaxaca’s most “heartwarming” spots for food and drinks, I visited the iconic Aguas Casilda, a nearly 100-year-old storefront that has been selling aguas frescas (fruit-flavored water) to at least three generations of Oaxacan families. The idea of fruit-flavored water might sound strange to foreigners, and unremarkable to most Mexicans (the beverages are common throughout the country, albeit with a more reduced variety). But in Oaxaca, aguas frescas – essentially a mix of fresh fruit pulp, plain water, and some sugar if needed – are synonymous with freshness and excitement, given the selection of different flavors made from the myriad of fruits that grow locally.

There was a dowdy little joint in Batumi, Georgia’s Black Sea port town, where two middle-aged women churned out the most exquisite Adjarian-style khachapuri pies in an old pizza oven. It was a must-stop for every trip to the coast, as there were few places in Tbilisi that could scorch such an authentic acharuli. As the years passed, the seedy potholed streets that hosted a pool hall, brothels and our favorite khachapuri joint transformed into a gentrified neighborhood of gift shops and boutiques catering to the ever-growing number of tourists flocking to Batumi. Meanwhile, the boat-shaped acharuli has become one of the most emblematic dishes of Georgian cuisine and is not only found all over Tbilisi, but is also being served in New York and Washington, DC.

The storefront restaurant Camas Sutra (a play on its location in the Camas neighborhood of Marseille) still sports “Boucherie, Charcuterie, Crèmerie” on the original red and yellow banners, left over from just 18 months ago when it was home to a neighborhood butcher. The “no restaurant sign” tactic, occasionally seen these days in hip neighborhoods of Marseille, is a choice to curate client discovery and word-of-mouth marketing. But glancing towards the large window as we pass by on this narrow street off Boulevard Chave, we instantly recognize that it is now a restaurant, with a solo high table outside for apéro, a grand, 17-person wooden table inside, an open kitchen, and the chef and wine server prepping, circulating, and talking wine and food with their guests.

Rissóis (plural) are half-moon-shaped savory pastries of peasant origins, and from grandmothers' houses to bakeries to the classic tascas, they are as ubiquitous in Portugal as cod fritters. However, the rissol is less popular than its contender, even though it is the perfect appetizer for any occasion, with a variety of different fillings which range from minced beef to shrimp.